_Madame Eglentyne_
CHAUCER'S PRIORESS IN REAL LIFE
Ther was also a Nonne, a Prioresse,
That of her smyling was ful simple and coy;
Hir grettest ooth was ne but by sëynt Loy;
And she was cleped madame Eglentyne.
Ful wel she song the service divyne,
Entuned in hir nose ful semely;
And Frensh she spak ful faire and fetisly,
After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,
For Frensh of Paris was to hir unknowe.
At mete wel y-taught was she with-alle;
She leet no morsel from hir lippes falle,
Ne wette hir fingres in hir sauce depe.
Wel coude she carie a morsel and wel kepe,
That no drope ne fille up-on hir brest.
In curteisye was set ful muche hir lest.
Hir over lippe wyped she so clene,
That in hir coppe was no ferthing sene
Of grece, whan she dronken haddie hir draughte
Ful semely after hir mete she raughte,
And sikerly she was of greet disport,
And ful plesaunt and amiable of port,
And peyned hir to countrefete chere
Of court, and been estatlich of manere,
And to be holden digne of reverence.
But, for to speken of hir conscience,
She was so charitable and so pitous,
She wolde wepe, if that she sawe a mous
Caught in a trap, if it were deed or bledde.
Of smale houndes had she, that she fedde
With rosted flesh, or milk and wastel-breed.
But sore weep she if oon of hem were deed,
Or if men smoot it with a yerde smerte:
And al was conscience and tendre herte
Ful semely hir wimpel pinched was:
Hir nose tretys; her eyen greye as glas;
Hir mouth ful smal, and ther-to softe and reed;
But sikerly she hadde a fair foreheed;
It was almost a spanne brood, I trowe;
For, hardily, she was nat undergrowe.
Ful fetis was hir cloke, as I was war.
Of smal coral aboute hir arm she bar
A peire of bedes, gauded al with grene;
And ther-on heng a broche of gold ful shene,
On which ther was first write a crowned A,
And after, _Amor vincit omnia!_
--GEOFFREY CHAUCER
_Prologue_ to the _Canterbury Tales_
Every one knows Chaucer's description of the Prioress, Madame Eglentyne,
who rode with that very motley and talkative company on the way to
Canterbury. There is no portrait in his gallery which has given rise to
more diverse comment among critics. One interprets it as a cutting
attack on the worldliness of the Church; another thinks that Chaucer
meant to draw a charming and sympathetic picture of womanly gentleness;
one says that it is a caricature, another an ideal; and an American
professor even finds in it a psychological study of thwarted maternal
instinct, apparently because Madame Eglentyne was fond of little dogs
and told a story about a schoolboy. The mere historian may be excused
from following these vagaries. To him Chaucer's Prioress, like Chaucer's
monk and Chaucer's friar, will simply be one more instance of the almost
photographic accuracy of the poet's observation. The rippling
undercurrent of satire is always there; but it is Chaucer's own peculiar
satire--mellow, amused, uncondemning, the most subtle kind of satire,
which does not depend upon exaggeration. The literary critic has only
Chaucer's words and his own heart, or sometimes (low be it spoken) his
own desire to be original, by which to guide his judgement. But the
historian knows; he has all sorts of historical sources in which to
study nunneries, and there he meets Chaucer's Prioress at every turn.
Above all, he has the bishop's registers.
For a long time historians foolishly imagined that kings and wars and
parliaments and the jury system alone were history; they liked
chronicles and Acts of Parliament, and it did not strike them to go and
look in dusty episcopal archives for the big books in which medieval
bishops entered up the letters which they wrote and all the complicated
business of running their dioceses. But when historians did think of
looking there, they found a mine of priceless information about almost
every side of social and ecclesiastical life. They had to dig for it of
course, for almost all that is worth knowing has to be mined like
precious metals out of a rock; and for one nugget the miner often has to
grub for days underground in a mass of dullness; and when he has got it
he has to grub in his own heart, or else he will not understand it. The
historians found fine gold in the bishops' registers, when once they
persuaded themselves that it was not beneath their dignity to grub
there. They found descriptions of vicarages, with all their furniture
and gardens; they found marriage disputes; they found wills full of
entertaining legacies to people dead hundreds of years ago; they found
excommunications; they found indulgences to men for relieving the poor,
repairing roads, and building bridges, long before there was any poor
law, or any county council; they found trials for heresy and witchcraft;
they found accounts of miracles worked at the tombs of saints and even
of some quite unsaintly people, such as Thomas of Lancaster, and Edward
II, and Simon de Montfort; they found lists of travelling expenses when
the bishops rode round their dioceses; in one they even found a minute
account of the personal appearance of Queen Philippa, then a little girl
at her father's Court at Hainault, whom the Bishop of Exeter had been
sent to inspect, in order to see if she were pretty and good enough to
marry Edward III: she was nine years old, and the bishop said that her
second teeth were whiter than her first teeth and that her nose was
broad but not snub, which was reassuring for Edward.[1] Last, but not
least, the historians found a multitude of documents about monasteries,
and among these documents they found visitation records, and among
visitation records they found Chaucer's Prioress, smiling full simple
and coy, fair forehead, well-pinched wimple, necklace, little dogs, and
all, as though she had stepped into a stuffy register by mistake for the
_Canterbury Tales_ and was longing to get out again.
This was the reason that Madame Eglentyne got into the register. In the
Middle Ages all the nunneries of England, and a great many of the
monasteries, used to be visited at intervals by the bishop of their
diocese--or by somebody sent by him--in order to see whether they were
behaving properly. It was rather like the periodical visitation of a
school by one of Her Majesty's inspectors, only what happened was very
different. When Her Majesty's inspector comes he does not sit in state
in the hall, and call all the inmates in front of him one after another,
from the head mistress to the smallest child in the first form, and
invite them to say in what way they think the school is not being
properly run, and what complaints they have to make against their
mistresses and which girl habitually breaks the rules--all breathed
softly and privately into his ear, with no one to overhear them. But
when the bishop came to visit a nunnery, that is precisely what
happened. First of all, he sent a letter to say he was coming, and to
bid the nuns prepare for him. Then he came, with his clerks and a
learned official or two, and was met solemnly by the prioress and all
the nuns, and preached a sermon in their church, and was entertained,
perhaps, to dinner. And then he prepared to examine them, and one by one
they came before him, in order of rank, beginning with the prioress, and
what they had to do was to tell tales about each other. He wanted to
find out if the prioress were ruling well, and if the services were
properly performed, and if the finances were in good order, and if
discipline were maintained; and if any nun had a complaint, then was the
time to make it.
And the nuns were full of complaints. A modern schoolgirl would go pale
with horror over their capacity for tale-bearing. If one nun had boxed
her sister's ears, if another had cut church, if another were too much
given to entertaining friends, if another went out without a licence, if
another had run away with a wandering fluteplayer, the bishop was sure
to hear about it; that is, unless the whole convent were in a disorderly
state, and the nuns had made a compact to wink at each other's
peccadilloes; and not to betray them to the bishop, which occasionally
happened. And if the prioress were at all unpopular he was quite certain
to hear all about her. 'She fares splendidly in her own room and never
invites us,' says one nun; 'She has favourites,' says another, 'and
when she makes corrections she passes lightly over those whom she likes,
and speedily punishes those whom she dislikes'; 'She is a fearful
scold,' says a third; 'She dresses more like a secular person than a
nun, and wears rings and necklaces,' says a fourth; 'She goes
out riding to see her friends far too often,' says a fifth;
'She-is-a-very-bad-business-woman-and-she-has-let-the-house-get-into-
debt-and-the-church-is-falling about-our-ears-and-we-don't-get-enough-
food-and-she-hasn't-given-us-any-clothes-for-two-years-and-she-has-sold-
woods-and farms-without-your-licence-and-she-has-pawned-our-best-set-of
spoons; and no wonder, when she never consults us in any business as she
ought to do.' They go on like that for pages, and the bishop must often
have wanted to put his fingers in his ears and shout to them to stop;
especially as the prioress had probably spent half an hour, for her
part, in telling him how disobedient and ill-tempered, and thoroughly
badly behaved the nuns were.
All these tales the bishop's clerk solemnly wrote down in a big book,
and when the examination was over the bishop summoned all the nuns
together again. And if they had answered 'All is well', as they
sometimes did, or only mentioned trivial faults, he commended them and
went his way; and if they had shown that things really were in a bad
way, he investigated particular charges and scolded the culprits and
ordered them to amend, and when he got back to his palace, or the manor
where he was staying, he wrote out a set of injunctions, based on the
complaints, and saying exactly how things were to be improved; and of
these injunctions one copy was entered in his register and another was
sent by hand to the nuns, who were supposed to read it aloud at
intervals and to obey everything in it. We have in many bishops'
registers these lists of injunctions, copied into them by the bishops'
clerks, and in some, notably in a splendid fifteenth-century Lincoln
register, belonging to the good bishop Alnwick, we have also the
evidence of the nuns, just as it was taken down from their chattering
mouths, and these are the most human and amusing of all medieval
records. It is easy to see what important historical documents
visitation reports are, especially in a diocese like Lincoln, which
possesses an almost unbroken series of registers, ranging over the three
centuries before the Dissolution, so that one can trace the whole
history of some of the nunneries by the successive visitations.
Let us see what light the registers will throw upon Madame Eglentyne,
before Chaucer observed her mounting her horse outside the Tabard Inn.
Doubtless she first came to the nunnery when she was quite a little
girl, because girls counted as grown up when they were fifteen in the
Middle Ages; they could be married out of hand at twelve, and they could
become nuns for ever at fourteen. Probably Eglentyne's father had three
other daughters to marry, each with a dowry, and a gay young spark of a
son, who spent a lot of money on fashionable suits.
Embroidered ... as it were a mede
All ful of fresshe flowers white and rede.
So he thought he had better settle the youngest at once; and he got
together a dowry (it was rarely possible to get into a nunnery without
one, though Church law really forbade anything except voluntary
offerings), and, taking Eglentyne by the hand one summer day, he popped
her into a nunnery a few miles off, which had been founded by his
ancestors. We may even know what it cost him; it was rather a select,
aristocratic house, and he had to pay an entrance fee of £200 in modern
money; and then he had to give Eglentyne her new habit and a bed, and
some other furniture; and he had to make a feast on the day she became a
nun, and invite all the nuns and all his own friends; and he had to tip
the friar, who preached the sermon; and, altogether, it was a great
affair.[2] But the feast would not come at once, because Eglentyne would
have to remain a novice for some years, until she was old enough to take
the vows. So she would stay in the convent and be taught how to sing and
to read, and to talk French of the school of Stratford-atte-Bowe with
the other novices. Perhaps she was the youngest, for girls often did not
enter the convent until they were old enough to decide for themselves
whether they wanted to be nuns; but there were certainly some other
quite tiny novices learning their lessons; and occasionally there would
be a little girl like the one whose sad fate is recorded in a dull
law-book, shut up in a nunnery by a wicked stepfather who wanted her
inheritance (a nun could not inherit land, because she was supposed to
be dead to the world), and told by the nuns that the devil would fly
away with her if she tried to set foot outside the door.[3] However,
Eglentyne had a sunny disposition and liked life in the nunnery, and had
a natural aptitude for the pretty table manners which she learnt there,
as well as for talking French, and though she was not at all prim and
liked the gay clothes and pet dogs which she used to see at home in her
mother's bower, still she had no hesitation at all about taking the veil
when she was fifteen, and indeed she rather liked the fuss that was made
of her, and being called _Madame_ or _Dame_, which was the courtesy
title always given to a nun.
The years passed and Eglentyne's life jogged along peacefully enough
behind the convent walls. The great purpose for which the nunneries
existed, and which most of them fulfilled not unworthily, was the praise
of God. Eglentyne spent a great deal of her time singing and praying in
the convent church, and, as we know,
Ful wel she song the service divyne,
Entuned in hir nose ful semely.
The nuns had seven monastic offices to say every day. About 2 a.m. the
night office was said; they all got out of bed when the bell rang, and
went down in the cold and the dark to the church choir and said Matins,
followed immediately by Lauds. Then they went back to bed, just as the
dawn was breaking in the sky, and slept again for three hours, and then
got up for good at six o'clock and said Prime. After that there followed
Tierce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline, spread at intervals through
the day. The last service, compline, was said at 7 p.m. in winter, and
at 8 p.m. in summer, after which the nuns were supposed to go straight
to bed in the dorter, in which connexion one Nun's Rule ordains that
'None shall push up against another wilfully, nor spit upon the stairs
going up and down, but if they tread it out forthwith'![4] They had in
all about eight hours' sleep, broken in the middle by the night service.
They had three meals, a light repast of bread and beer after prime in
the morning, a solid dinner to the accompaniment of reading aloud in the
middle of the day, and a short supper immediately after vespers at 5
or 6 p.m.
From 12 to 5 p.m. in winter and from 1 to 6 p.m. in summer Eglentyne
and her sisters were supposed to devote themselves to manual or brain
work, interspersed with a certain amount of sober and godly recreation.
She would spin, or embroider vestments with the crowned monogram M of
the Blessed Virgin in blue and gold thread, or make little silken purses
for her friends and finely sewn bands for them to bind round their arms
after a bleeding. She would read too, in her psalter or in such saints'
lives as the convent possessed, written in French or English; for her
Latin was weak, though she could construe _Amor vincit omnia_. Perhaps
her convent took in a few little schoolgirls to learn their letters and
good manners with the nuns, and when she grew older she helped to teach
them to read and sing; for though they were happy, they did not receive
a very extensive education from the good sisters. In the summer
Eglentyne was sometimes allowed to work in the convent garden, or even
to go out haymaking with the other nuns; and came back round-eyed to
confide in her confessor that she had seen the cellaress returning
therefrom seated behind the chaplain on his nag,[5] and had thought what
fun it must be to jog behind stout Dan John.
Except for certain periods of relaxation strict silence was supposed to
be observed in the convent for a large part of the day, and if Eglentyne
desired to communicate with her sisters, she was urged to do so by means
of signs. The persons who drew up the lists of signs which were in use
in medieval monastic houses, however, combined a preternatural ingenuity
with an extremely exiguous sense of humour, and the sort of dumb
pandemonium which went on at Eglentyne's dinner table must often have
been more mirth-provoking than speech. The sister who desired fish would
'wag her hands displayed sidelings in manner of a fish tail'; she who
wanted milk would 'draw her left little finger in manner of milking';
for mustard one would 'hold her nose in the upper part of her right fist
and rub it'; another for salt would 'fillip with her right thumb and
forefinger over the left thumb'; another desirous of wine would 'move
her forefinger up and down the end of her thumb afore her eye'; and the
guilty sacristan, struck by the thought that she had not provided
incense for the Mass, would 'put her two fingers into her nostrils'. In
one such table drawn up for nuns there are no less than 106 signs, and
on the whole it is not surprising that the rule of the same nuns enjoins
that 'it is never lawful to use them without some reason and profitable
need, for oft-times more hurt hath an evil word, and more offence it may
be to God'.[6]
The nuns, of course, would not have been human if they had not sometimes
grown a little weary of all these services and this silence; for the
religious life was not, nor was it intended to be, an easy one. It was
not a mere means of escape from work and responsibility. In the early
golden age of monasticism only men and women with a vocation, that is to
say a real genius for monastic life, entered convents. Moreover, when
there they worked very hard with hand and brain, as well as with soul,
and so they got variety of occupation, which is as good as a holiday.
The basis of wise St Benedict's Rule was a nicely adjusted combination
of variety with regularity; for he knew human nature. Thus monks and
nuns did not find the services monotonous, and indeed regarded them as
by far the best part of the day. But in the later Middle Ages, when
Chaucer lived, young people had begun to enter monastic houses rather as
a profession than as a vocation. Many truly spiritual men and women
still took the vows, but with them came others who were little suited to
monastic life, and who lowered its standard, because it was hard and
uncongenial to them. Eglentyne became a nun because her father did not
want the trouble and expense of finding her a husband, and because being
a nun was about the only career for a well-born lady who did not marry.
Moreover, by this time, monks and nuns had grown more lazy, and did
little work with their hands and still less with their heads,
particularly in nunneries, where the early tradition of learning had
died out and where many nuns could hardly understand the Latin in which
their services were written. The result was that monastic life began to
lose that essential variety which St Benedict had designed for it, and
as a result the regularity sometimes became irksome, and the series of
services degenerated into a mere routine of peculiar monotony, which
many of the singers could no longer keep alive with spiritual fervour.
Thus sometimes (it must not be imagined that this happened in all or
even in the majority of houses) the services became empty forms, to be
hurried through with scant devotion and occasionally with scandalous
irreverence. It was the almost inevitable reaction from too
much routine.
Carelessness in the performance of the monastic hours was an exceedingly
common fault during the later Middle Ages, though the monks were always
worse about it than the nuns. Sometimes they 'cut' the services.
Sometimes they behaved with the utmost levity, as at Exeter in 1330,
where the canons giggled and joked and quarrelled during the services
and dropped hot candle wax from the upper stalls on to the shaven heads
of the singers in the stalls below![7] Sometimes they came late to
matins, in the small hours after midnight. This fault was common in
nunneries, for the nuns always would insist on having private drinkings
and gossipings in the evening after compline, instead of going straight
to bed, as the rule demanded--a habit which did not conduce to
wakefulness at 1 a.m. Consequently they were somewhat sleepy at matins
and found an almost Johnsonian difficulty in getting up early. Wise St
Benedict foresaw the difficulty, when he wrote in his rule: 'When they
rise for the Divine Office, let them gently encourage one another,
because of the excuses made by those that are drowsy.'[8] At the nunnery
of Stainfield in 1519 the bishop discovered that half an hour sometimes
elapsed between the last stroke of the bell and the beginning of the
service, and that some of the nuns did not sing, but dozed, partly
because they had not enough candles, but chiefly because they went late
to bed;[9] and whoever is without sin among us, let him cast the first
stone! There was a tendency also among both monks and nuns to slip out
before the end of the service on any good or bad excuse: they had to see
after the dinner or the guest-house, their gardens needed weeding, or
they did not feel well. But the most common fault of all was to gabble
through the services as quickly as they could in order to get them over.
They left out the syllables at the beginning and end of words, they
omitted the dipsalma or pause between two verses, so that one side of
the choir was beginning the second half before the other side had
finished the first; they skipped sentences, they mumbled and slurred
what should have been 'entuned in their nose ful semely', and altogether
they made a terrible mess of the stately plainsong. So prevalent was
the fault of gabbling that the Father of Evil was obliged to charter a
special Devil called Tittivillus, whose sole business it was to collect
all these dropped syllables and carry them back to his master in a big
bag. In one way or another, we have a good deal of information about
him, for he was always letting himself be seen by holy men, who
generally had a sharp eye for devils. One Latin rhyme distinguishes
carefully between the contents of his sack: 'These are they who wickedly
corrupt the holy psalms: the dangler, the gasper, the leaper, the
galloper, the dragger, the mumbler, the fore-skipper, the fore-runner
and the over-leaper: Tittivillus collecteth the fragments of these men's
words.'[10] Indeed, a holy Cistercian abbot once interviewed the poor
little devil himself and heard about his alarming industry; this is the
story as it is told in _The Myroure of Oure Ladye_, written for the
delectation of the nuns of Syon in the fifteenth century: 'We read of a
holy Abbot of the order of Citeaux that while he stood in the choir at
matins he saw a fiend that had a long and great poke hanging about his
neck and went about the choir from one to another and waited busily
after all letters and syllables and words and failings that any made;
and them he gathered diligently and put them in his poke. And when he
came before the Abbot, waiting if aught had escaped him that he might
have gotten and put in his bag, the Abbot was astonied and afeard of the
foulness and misshape of him and said unto him: What art thou? And he
answered and said, I am a poor devil and my name is Tittivillus and I do
mine office that is committed unto me. And what is thine office? said
the Abbot. He answered: I must each day, he said, bring my master a
thousand pokes full of failings and of negligences and syllables and
words, that are done in your order in reading and singing and else I
must be sore beaten.'[11] But there is no reason to suppose that he
often got his beating, though one may be sure that Madame Eglentyne,
busily chanting through her nose, never gave him the slightest help. In
his spare moments, when he was not engaged in picking up those
unconsidered trifles which the monks let fall from the psalms,
Tittivillus used to fill up odd corners of his sack with the idle talk
of people who gossiped in church; and he also sat up aloft and collected
all the high notes of vain tenors, who sang to their own glory, instead
of to the glory of God, and pitched the chants three notes higher than
the cracked voices of their elders could rise.
But the monotony of convent life sometimes did more than make the nuns
unconscious contributors to Tittivillus's sack. It sometimes played
havoc with their tempers. The nuns were not chosen for convent life
because they were saints. They were no more immune from tantrums than
was the Wife of Bath, who was out of all charity when other village
wives went into church before her; and sometimes they got terribly on
each others' nerves. Readers of _Piers Plowman_ will remember that when
the seven deadly sins come in, Wrath tells how he was cook to the
prioress of a convent and, says he,
Of wycked wordes I, Wrath ... here wordes imade,
Til 'thow lixte' and 'thow lixte' ... lopen oute at ones,
And eyther hitte other ... vnder the cheke;
Hadde thei had knyves, by Cryst ... her eyther had killed other.
To be sure, it is not often that we hear of anything so bad as that
fifteenth-century prioress, who used to drag her nuns round the choir by
their veils in the middle of the service, screaming 'Liar!' and
'Harlot!' at them;[12] or that other sixteenth-century lady who used to
kick them and hit them on the head with her fists and put them in the
stocks.[13] All prioresses were not 'ful plesaunt and amiable of port',
or stately in their manner. The records of monastic visitations show
that bad temper and petty bickering sometimes broke the peace of
convent life.
But we must be back at Eglentyne. She went on living for ten or twelve
years as a simple nun, and she sang the services very nicely and had a
sweet temper and pretty manners and was very popular. Moreover, she was
of good birth; Chaucer tells us a great deal about her beautiful
behaviour at table and her courtesy, which shows that she was a lady
born and bred; indeed, his description of this might have been taken
straight out of one of the feudal books of deportment for girls; even
her personal beauty--straight nose, grey eyes, and little red
mouth--conforms to the courtly standard. The convents were apt to be
rather snobbish; ladies and rich burgesses' daughters got into them, but
poor and low-born girls never. So the nuns probably said to each other
that what with her pretty ways and her good temper and her aristocratic
connexions, wouldn't it be a good thing to choose her for prioress when
the old prioress died? And so they did, and she had been a prioress for
some years when Chaucer met her. At first it was very exciting, and
Eglentyne liked being called 'Mother' by nuns who were older than
herself, and having a private room to sit in and all the visitors to
entertain. But she soon found that it was not by any means all a bed of
roses; for there was a great deal of business to be done by the head of
a house--not only looking after the internal discipline of the convent,
but also superintending money matters and giving orders to the bailiffs
on her estates, and seeing that the farms were paying well, and the
tithes coming in to the churches which belonged to the nunnery, and that
the Italian merchants who came to buy the wool off her sheeps' backs
gave a good price for it. In all this business she was supposed to take
the advice of the nuns, meeting in the chapter-house, where all business
was transacted. I am afraid that sometimes Eglentyne used to think that
it was much better to do things by herself, and so she would seal
documents with the convent seal without telling them. One should always
distrust the head of an office or school or society who says, with a
self-satisfied air, that it is much more satisfactory to do the thing
herself than to depute it to the proper subordinates; it either means
that she is an autocrat, or else that she cannot organize. Madame
Eglentyne was rather an autocrat, in a good-natured sort of way, and
besides she hated bother. So she did not always consult the nuns; and I
fear too (after many researches into that past of hers which Chaucer
forgot to mention) that she often tried to evade rendering an account of
income and expenditure to them every year, as she was supposed to do.
The nuns, of course, objected to this; and the first time the bishop
came on his rounds they complained about it to him. They said, too, that
she was a bad business woman and got into debt; and that when she was
short of money she used to sell woods belonging to the convent, and
promise annual pensions to various people in return for lump sums down,
and lease out farms for a long time at low rates, and do various other
things by which the convent would lose in the long run. And besides,
she had let the roof of the church get into such ill repair that rain
came through the holes on to their heads when they were singing; and
would my lord bishop please to look at the holes in their clothes and
tell her to provide them with new ones? Other wicked prioresses used
sometimes even to pawn the plate and jewels of the convent, to get money
for their own private purposes. But Eglentyne was not at all wicked or
dishonest, though she was a bad manager; the fact was that she had no
head for figures. I am _sure_ that she had no head for figures; you have
only got to read Chaucer's description of her to know that she was not a
mathematician. Besides the nuns were exaggerating: their clothes were
not in holes, only just a little threadbare. Madame Eglentyne was far
too fastidious to allow ragged clothes about her; and as to the roof of
the church, she had meant to save enough money to have some tiles put on
to it, but it really _was_ very hard to make two ends meet in a medieval
nunnery, especially if (as I repeat) you had no head for figures.
Probably the bishop saw how the land lay, so he ordered her never to do
anything without consulting the convent, and he shut up the common seal
in a box with three different sorts of locks, to which Madame Eglentyne
and two of the senior nuns had the keys, so that she could not open it
alone and so could not seal any business agreement without their
consent. And he ordered her to keep accounts and present them every year
(there are bundles of her accounts still preserved in the Record
Office). Finally he deputed a neighbouring rector to act as custodian of
the business affairs of the house so that she should always have his
help. Things went better after that.
Eglentyne, it seems, was never really interested in business, and was
quite pleased to have her time taken up with looking after internal
affairs and entertaining visitors, with an occasional jaunt outside to
see how the estates were getting on. And she began to find that she
could lead a much freer and gayer life now that she was a prioress; for
the prioress of a convent had rooms of her own, instead of sharing the
common dormitory and refectory; sometimes she even had a sort of little
house with a private kitchen. The abbess of one great nunnery at
Winchester in the sixteenth century had her own staff to look after her,
a cook, and an under cook, and a housemaid and a gentlewoman to wait
upon her, like any great lady in the world, and never dined with the
nuns except on state occasions. But a superior generally had with her
one nun to act as her companion and assist her in the choir and be a
witness to her good behaviour; this nun was called her chaplain, and was
supposed to be changed every year, to prevent favouritism. It will be
remembered that when Madame Eglentyne went on her pilgrimage she took
her nun chaplain with her, as well as three priests; that was because no
nun was ever allowed to go out alone. One of Madame Eglentyne's duties
as prioress was to entertain visitors with her celebrated cheer of
court, and we may be sure that she had a great many. Her sisters, who
were now grand ladies with husbands and manors of their own, and her old
father, and all the great people of the county came to congratulate her;
and after that they used often to drop in for a dinner of chickens and
wine and wastel bread if they passed the house on a journey, and
sometimes they spent the night there. One or two ladies, whose husbands
were away at the wars or on a pilgrimage to Rome, even came as paying
guests to the convent and lived there for a whole year, for nothing
pleased the country gentlemen or wealthy burgesses better than to use
nunneries as boarding-houses for their women-kind.
All this was very disturbing to the peace and quiet of the nuns, and
especially disturbing were the boarders, for they wore gay clothes, and
had pet dogs and callers, and set a very frivolous example to the nuns.
At one nunnery we find a bishop ordering: 'Let Felmersham's wife, with
her whole household and other women, be utterly removed from your
monastery within one year, seeing that they are a cause of disturbance
to the nuns and an occasion to bad example, by reason of their attire
and of those who come to visit them.'[14] It can be easily imagined
_why_ the bishops objected so much to the reception of these worldly
married women as boarders. Just substitute for 'Felmersham's wife' 'the
Wife of Bath' and all is explained. That lady was not a person whom a
prioress would lightly refuse; the list of her pilgrimages alone would
give her the _entrée_ into any nunnery. Smiling her gap-toothed smile
and riding easily upon her ambler, she would enter the gates, and what a
month of excitement would pass before she rode away again. I am sure
that it was she who taught Madame Eglentyne the most fashionable way to
pinch a wimple; and she certainly introduced hats 'as broad as is a
buckler or a targe' and scarlet stockings into some nunneries. The
bishops disliked it all very much, but they never succeeded in turning
the boarders out for all their efforts, because the nuns always needed
the money which they paid for their board and lodging.
It is easy to understand that this constant intercourse with worldly
visitors would give rise to the spread of worldly habits in Madame
Eglentyne's nunnery. Nuns, after all, were but women, and they had the
amiable vanities of their sex. But Authority (with a large A) did not
consider their vanities amiable at all. It was the view of Authority
that the Devil had dispatched three lesser D's to be the damnation of
nuns, and those three D's were Dances, Dresses, and Dogs. Medieval
England was famous for dancing and mumming and minstrelsy; it was Merry
England because, however plague and pestilence and famine and the
cruelties of man to man might darken life, still it loved these things.
But there were no two views possible about what the Church thought of
dancing; it was accurately summed up by one moralist in the aphorism,
'The Devil is the inventor and governor and disposer of dances and
dancing.' Yet when we look into those accounts which Madame Eglentyne
rendered (or did not render) to her nuns at the end of every year, we
shall find payments for wassail at New Year and Twelfth Night, for May
games, for bread and ale on bonfire nights, for harpers and players at
Christmas, for a present to the Boy Bishop on his rounds, and perhaps
for an extra pittance when the youngest schoolgirl was allowed to dress
up and act as abbess of the convent for the whole of Innocents' Day. And
when we look in the bishops' registers we shall find Madame Eglentyne
forbidden 'all manner of minstrelsy, interludes, dancing or revelling
within your holy place'; and she would be fortunate indeed if her bishop
would make exception for Christmas, 'and other honest times of
recreation among yourselves used in absence of seculars in all wise'.
Somehow one feels an insistent conviction that her cheer of court
included dancing.[15]
Then, again, there were the fashionable dresses which the visitors
introduced into nunneries. It is quite certain that Madame Eglentyne
was not unmoved by them; and it is a sad fact that she began to think
the monastic habit very black and ugly, and the monastic life very
strict; and to decide that if some little amenities were imported into
it no one would be a penny the worse, and perhaps the bishop would not
notice. That is why, when Chaucer met her,
Ful fetis was hir cloke, as I was war,
Of smal coral aboute hir arm she bar
A peire of bedes, gauded al with grene,
And ther-on heng a broche of gold ful shene.
Unfortunately, however, the bishop did notice; the registers are indeed
full of those clothes of Madame Eglentyne's, and of the even more
frivolous ones which she wore in the privacy of the house. For more than
six weary centuries the bishops waged a holy war against fashion in the
cloister, and waged it in vain; for as long as nuns mingled freely with
secular women, it was impossible to prevent them from adopting secular
modes. Occasionally a wretched bishop would find himself floundering
unhandily, in masculine bewilderment, through something like a complete
catalogue of contemporary fashions, in order to specify what the nuns
were _not_ to wear. Synods sat solemnly, bishops and archbishops shook
their grey heads, over golden hairpins and silver belts, jewelled rings,
laced shoes, slashed tunics, low necks and long trains, gay colours,
costly cloth, and valuable furs. The nuns were supposed to wear their
veils pinned tightly down to their eyebrows, so that their foreheads
were completely hidden; but high foreheads happened to be fashionable
among worldly ladies, who even shaved theirs to make them higher, and
the result was that the nuns could not resist lifting up and spreading
out their veils, for how otherwise did Chaucer _know_ that Madame
Eglentyne had such a fair forehead ('almost a spanne broad, I trowe')?
If she had been wearing her veil properly, it would have been invisible,
and the father of English poetry may be observed discreetly but plainly
winking the other eye when he puts in that little touch; his
contemporaries would see the point very quickly. And that brooch and
that fetis cloak of hers.... Here is what some tale-bearing nuns told
the Bishop of Lincoln about their Prioress, fifty years after Chaucer
wrote the _Canterbury Tales_. 'The Prioress,' they said with their most
sanctimonious air, wears golden rings exceeding costly, with divers
precious stones and also girdles silvered and gilded over and silken
veils and she carries her veil too high above her forehead, so that her
forehead, being entirely uncovered, can be seen of all, and she wears
furs of vair. Also she wears shifts of cloth of Rennes, which costs
sixteen pence the ell. Also she wears kirtles laced with silk and tiring
pins of silver and silver gilt and has made all the nuns wear the like.
Also she wears above her veil a cap of estate, furred with budge. Item,
she has on her neck a long silken band, in English a lace, which hangs
down below her breast and there on a golden ring with one diamond.[16]
Is it not Madame Eglentyne to the life? Nothing escaped our good Dan
Chaucer's eye, for all that he rode always looking on the ground.
Moreover, it was not only in her dress that the Prioress and her sister
nuns aped the fashions of the world. Great ladies of the day loved to
amuse themselves with pet animals; and nuns were quick to follow their
example. So,
Of smale houndes had she, that she fedde
With rosted flesh, or milk and wastel-breed.
But sore weep she if oon of hem were deed,
Or if men smoot it with a yerde smerte.
The visitation reports are full of those little dogs and other animals;
and how many readers of the Prologue know that the smale houndes, like
the fair forehead and the brooch of gold full sheen, were strictly
against the rules? For the bishops regarded pets as bad for discipline,
and century after century they tried to turn the animals out of the
convents, without the slightest success. The nuns just waited till the
bishop had gone and then whistled their dogs back again. Dogs were
easily the favourite pets, though monkeys, squirrels, rabbits, birds and
(very rarely) cats were also kept. One archbishop had to forbid an
abbess whom he visited to keep _monkeys and a number of dogs_ in her own
chamber and charged her at the same time with stinting her nuns in food;
one can guess what became of the roasted flesh or milk and wastel-breed!
It was a common medieval practice to bring animals into church, where
ladies often attended service with dog in lap and men with hawk on
wrist; just as the highland farmer brings his collie with him today.
This happened in the nunneries too. Sometimes it was the lay-boarders in
the convents who brought their pets with them; there is a pathetic
complaint by the nuns of one house 'that Lady Audley, who boards there,
has a great abundance of dogs, insomuch that whenever she comes to
church there follow her twelve dogs, who make a great uproar in church,
hindering the nuns in their psalmody and the nuns thereby are
terrified!'[17] But often enough the nuns themselves transgressed.
Injunctions against bringing pet dogs into choir occur in several
visitation reports, the most amusing instance being contained in those
sent to Romsey Abbey by William of Wykeham in 1387, just about the same
year that Chaucer was writing the _Canterbury Tales_: 'Item,' runs the
injunction, 'whereas we have convinced ourselves by clear proofs that
some of the nuns of your house bring with them to church birds, rabbits,
hounds and such like frivolous things, whereunto they give more heed
than to the offices of the church, with frequent hindrance to their own
psalmody and to that of their fellow nuns and to the grievous peril of
their souls--therefore we strictly forbid you all and several, in virtue
of the obedience due to us that ye presume henceforward to bring to
church no birds, hounds, rabbits or other frivolous things that promote
indiscipline.... Item, whereas through hunting dogs and other hounds
abiding within your monastic precincts, the alms that should be given
to the poor are devoured and the church and cloister ... are foully
defiled ... and whereas, through their inordinate noise divine service
is frequently troubled--therefore we strictly command and enjoin you,
Lady Abbess, that you remove the dogs altogether and that you suffer
them never henceforth, nor any other such hounds, to abide within the
precincts of your nunnery.'[18] But it was useless for any bishop to
order Madame Eglentyne to give up her dogs, she could not even be parted
from them on a pilgrimage, though they must have been a great nuisance
in the inns, especially as she was so fussy about their food.
For Chaucer's prioress, we must admit, was rather a worldly lady, though
her pretty clothes and little dogs were harmless enough on modern
standards and one's sympathies are all against the bishops. She
probably became more worldly as time went on, because she had so many
opportunities for social intercourse. Not only had she to entertain
visitors in the convent, but often the business of the house took her
away upon journeys and these offered many opportunities for hobnobbing
with her neighbours. Sometimes she had to go to London to see after a
law-suit and that was a great excursion with another nun, or perhaps
two, and a priest and several yeomen to look after her. Sometimes she
had to go and see the bishop, to get permission to take in some little
schoolgirls. Sometimes she went to the funeral of a great man, whom her
father knew and who left her twenty shillings and a silver cup in his
will. Sometimes she went to the wedding of one of her sisters, or to be
godmother to their babies; though the bishops did not like these worldly
ties, or the dances and merry-makings which accompanied weddings and
christenings. Indeed her nuns occasionally complained about her journeys
and said that though she pretended it was all on the business of the
house, they had their doubts; and would the bishop please just look into
it. At one nunnery we find the nuns complaining that their house is £20
in debt 'and this principally owing to the costly expenses of the
prioress, because she frequently rides abroad and pretends that she does
so on the common business of the house although it is not so, with a
train of attendants much too large and tarries too long abroad and she
feasts sumptuously, both when abroad and at home and she is very choice
in her dress, so that the fur trimmings of her mantle are worth
100s'![19]
As a matter of fact there was nothing of which the church disapproved
more than this habit, shared by monks and nuns, of wandering about
outside their cloisters; moralists considered that intercourse with the
world was at the root of all the evil which crept into the monastic
system. The orthodox saying was that a monk out of his cloister was like
a fish out of water; and it will be remembered that Chaucer's monk
thought the text not worth an oyster. Indeed most of the monks managed
to swim very well in the air, and the nuns too persisted in taking every
sort of excuse for wandering in the world. Right through the Middle Ages
council after council, bishop after bishop, reformer after reformer,
tried in vain to keep them shut up. The greatest attempt of all began
in 1300, when the pope published a Bull ordering that nuns should
never, save in very exceptional circumstances, leave their convents and
that no secular person should be allowed to go in and visit them,
without a special licence and a good reason. This will make the modern
reader pity the poor nuns, but there is no need, for nobody ever
succeeded in putting it into force for more than five minutes, though
the bishops spent over two centuries in trying to do so and were still
trying in vain when King Henry VIII dissolved the nunneries and turned
all the nuns out into the world for ever, whether they liked it or not.
At one nunnery in the Lincoln diocese, when the bishop came and
deposited a copy of the Bull in the house and ordered the nuns to obey
it, they ran after him to the gate when he was riding away and threw the
Bull at his head, screaming that they would never observe it.[20] The
more practical bishops indeed, soon stopped trying to enforce the Bull
as it stood and contented themselves with ordering that nuns were not to
go out or pay visits too often, or without a companion, or without
licence, or without a good reason. But even in this they were not very
successful, because the nuns were most prolific in excellent reasons why
they should go out. Sometimes they said that their parents were ill; and
then they would go away to smooth the pillow of the sick. Sometimes they
said that they had to go to market to buy herrings. Sometimes they said
that they had to go to confession at a monastery. Sometimes it is really
difficult to imagine _what_ they said. What are we to think, for
instance, of that giddy nun 'who on Monday night did pass the night with
the Austin friars at Northampton and did dance and play the lute with
them in the same place until midnight, and on the night following she
passed the night with the Friars' preachers at Northampton, luting and
dancing in like manner'?[21] Chaucer told us how the friar loved harping
and how his eyes twinkled like stars in his head when he sang, but
failed perhaps to observe that he had lured Madame Eglentyne into
a dance.
It is indeed difficult to see what 'legitimate' excuses the nuns can
have made for all their wandering about in the streets and the fields
and in and out of people's houses, and it is sorely to be feared that
either they were too much of a handful for Madame Eglentyne, or else she
winked at their doings. For somehow or other one suspects that she had
no great opinion of bishops. After all Chaucer would never have met her,
if she had not managed to circumvent her own, since if there was one
excuse for wandering of which the bishops thoroughly disapproved, it was
precisely the excuse of pilgrimages. Madame Eglentyne was not quite as
simple and coy as she looked. How many of the literary critics, who
chuckle over her, know that she never ought to have got into the
Prologue at all? The Church was quite clear in its mind that pilgrimages
for nuns were to be discouraged. As early as 791 a council had forbidden
the practice and in 1195 another at York decreed, 'In order that the
opportunity of wandering may be taken from nuns we forbid them to take
the path of pilgrimage.' In 1318 an archbishop of York strictly forbade
the nuns of one convent to leave their house 'by reason of any vow of
pilgrimage which they might have taken. If any had taken such vows she
was to say as many psalters as it would have taken days to perform the
pilgrimage so rashly vowed.'[22] One has a melancholy vision of poor
Madame Eglentyne saying psalters interminably through her tretys nose,
instead of jogging along so gaily with her motley companions and telling
so prettily her tale of little St Hugh. Such prohibitions might be
multiplied from medieval records; and indeed it is unnecessary to go
further than Chaucer to understand why it was that bishops offered such
strenuous opposition to pilgrimages for nuns; one has only to remember
some of the folk, in whose company the prioress travelled and some of
the tales they told. If one could only be certain, for instance, that
she rode all the time with her nun and her priests, or at least between
the Knight and the poor Parson of a town! But there were also the Miller
and the Summoner and (worst of all) that cheerful and engaging sinner,
the Wife of Bath. It is really quite disturbing to think what additional
details the Wife of Bath may have given the prioress about her
five husbands.
This then was Chaucer's prioress in real life, for the poet who drew her
was one of the most wonderful observers in the whole of English
literature. We may wade through hundreds of visitation reports and
injunctions and everywhere the grey eyes of his prioress will twinkle at
us out of their pages, and in the end we must always go to Chaucer for
her picture, to sum up everything that historical records have taught
us. As the bishop found her, so he saw her, aristocratic,
tender-hearted, worldly, taking pains to 'countrefete there of court';
liking pretty clothes and little dogs; a lady of importance, attended by
a nun and three priests; spoken to with respect by the none too
mealy-mouthed host--no 'by Corpus Dominus' or 'cokkes bones' or 'tel on
a devel wey' for her, but 'cometh neer, my lady prioress,' and
My lady Prioresse, by your leve
If that I wiste I sholde yow nat greve,
I wolde demen that ye tellen sholde
A tale next, if so were that ye wolde.
Now wol ye vouche-sauf, my lady dere?
He talks to no one else like that, save perhaps to the knight. Was she
religious? Perhaps; but save for her singing the divine service and for
her lovely address to the Virgin, at the beginning of her tale, Chaucer
can find but little to say on the point;
But for speken of hir conscience (he says)
She was so charitable and so pitous,
and then, as we are waiting to hear of her almsgiving to the poor--that
she would weep over a mouse in a trap, or a beaten puppy, says Chaucer.
A good ruler of her house? again, doubtless. But when Chaucer met her
the house was ruling itself somewhere at the 'shire's ende'. The world
was full of fish out of water in the fourteenth century, and, by sëynt
Loy, said Madame Eglentyne, swearing her greatest oath, like Chaucer's
monk, she held that famous text not worth an oyster. So we take our
leave of her, characteristically on the road to Canterbury.